


They're Coming to Get You

by elle_stone



Series: Cold Creeps Up the Length of My Spine [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, F/M, History nerd Bellamy goes meta, Reapers, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 00:30:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21205736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: A young couple in love search out a moment of privacy in the woods. Bellamy jokes of encountering Reapers lurking behind the trees. Clarke thinks they should take the old legends a little more seriously.





	They're Coming to Get You

**Author's Note:**

> For thelittlefanpire, who requested Bellarke + Canonverse + Reapers with an urban legend feel.

Clarke is laughing as she runs, laughing so hard that she almost cannot breathe, laughing as she chases Bellamy madly through the woods. They have strayed far from the path by now. The ground inclines gently beneath them, leading them ever deeper down into a valley or ravine. Recent rains have turned the tree leaves a deep, shining, verdant color, and left the ground wet and muddy, squelching beneath their boots—the whole forest a riot of growth and new life.    


A thick fog has started to roll in as the afternoon unfurls. In some spots the mist is so heavy that Clarke can barely see Bellamy through the gloom, as he darts right and left, skipping over rocks and bounding over tree roots ahead of her. Around them, droplets of water fall down from tree leaf to tree leaf, patter softly along the ground. The noise they themselves make, running and laughing and yelling, shakes and echoes through the wilderness: a wonderful, joyful, human disturbance in the thick and gathering gloom.   


Clarke picks up her pace, her hand pressed tight against a stitch in her side. Just a little bit faster, and she'll catch up to him. Just a little faster—except she can't stop laughing. She is so completely, so unabashedly happy.   


They have been on the ground now almost a year: six months at war, and nearly six months of peace. And she finally believes it will hold. They are safe. They are free, and in this wide stretch of freedom, this broad swath of safety, they are able to grow in ways she never even imagined were possible on the Ark. They've started to build real houses, to look for farmland, to solidify alliances and partnerships. They consider the future with optimism and hope. And they allow themselves, sometimes, to act like kids again, like this—   


Never on the Ark did any of them have such room to play.   


Clark launches herself off a rotting, hollow log, and gains momentum as the ground slopes down beneath her feet. Bellamy is just ahead of her, and she thinks that she should slow herself down now but it's too late: they’re on a collision course. She runs directly into him, sending him staggering a few steps with a low  _oof_ , then wraps her arms around him in a tight, warm embrace. Their laughter trails away into a ragged catching of breath, but Bellamy is still grinning as he turns himself around in her arms.   


"Caught you," Clarke says, breathless, barely audible—she's looking up at him with a goofy, bright smile on her lips.   


Bellamy slings his arms around her waist. "That you did."   


Now that they are silent, or nearly so, the little sounds of the forest echo louder, bigger. Something small rustling through the undergrowth. The steady music of invisible insects.   


"Now I get to kiss you," Clarke murmurs, and leans up, until she's pressing her lips softly to his. Still out of breath, warm from exertion, and giddy just from being close to him, she lets the kiss linger without deepening, presses herself close but does not tighten her hold. The fog swirls around their feet, the forest around them endless. They are right in the heart of it, alone together, perhaps in love.    


"Is that why you were chasing me?" Bellamy asks, with a hint of that old arrogant smile, as he pulls back. "To have your way with me?" He bumps his nose against her nose, teases her by leaning in just a little bit closer, but when she leans in too, he pulls away.   


"I don't think I have to chase you to have my way with you." She slides her hands farther down, gives his ass a squeeze. "Your turn now."   


He raises his eyebrows. "To have my way with you?"   


She shakes her head, a teasing little smile curling at the corner of her lips.   


"To kiss you?"   


Another no.   


"To chase me,” Clarke says, with a bright, wicked grin. Then she slaps his ass, breaks free of his embrace, and sets off running.    


"You think I can't catch you, Princess?" Bellamy yells, but she's got a head start on him, and the deepening fog helps obscure her crafty, unpredictable movements. They've left the settlement so far behind that a part of her wonders how they will ever find their way home. Bellamy's a better tracker than she is, though, and she remembers a few lessons from Earth Skills, and a few more lessons from time actually spent on Earth.  So they should be fine—even if all of the trees have started to look the same, and it's hard to keep a sense of direction through the mist.    


The ground slopes down at a harder angle, around an outcropping that might be the entrance to a cave. Clarke runs down along the side of it, but Bellamy jumps up on top—and as he does, the top of the cave clangs out loudly beneath his feet.    


Clarke stops abruptly in her tracks, more surprised than shocked, turns around and looks up at where Bellamy is standing. He looks more than a little startled himself. After a moment, he stomps his foot again. The clanging sound repeats, harsh and metallic in the forest stillness.   


Clarke walks back toward the cave entrance, which she sees now is much too round to be that of an actual cave, as Bellamy jumps down to the ground next to her. "Looks like we found another tunnel," he says, tilting his head to peer in. The opening is half-obscured with hanging vines, just as the top and sides have been covered nearly completely with vegetation and moss, and the inside is so inscrutably dark that they can only barely make out the gleam of corroded, rusting metal. They've found tunnels before, closer to camp, have used them as shortcuts when traveling to and from the dropship site, but they've never seen any this far out before. This one seems older, too, and particularly disused.   


Bellamy bends down and takes a tentative step inside, then freezes when Clarke tells him: "Stop."   


He ducks back out again, gives her an inquisitive look. In truth, she's not sure why she said it. The word just shot out of her, before she could think.   


When she doesn't explain herself, only looks back at him with a slightly embarrassed expression, Bellamy crosses his arms against his chest and asks, "What is it? Do you think a Reaper is going to get me?"   


She scowls at him. "Shut up, asshole."   


"Clarke, come on!" He throws his hands up, and when she turns away, he steps closer and wraps his arms around her again. She tells herself she won't react, but the gentle nuzzle of his nose against her ear and her cheek sends a warm, soft feeling through her, and she relaxes against him despite herself. Not that it doesn't feel nice, just to relax. That spike of fear she'd felt, for a moment, when Bellamy poked his head into the dark, dank entrance to the tunnel—it was utterly irrational. Just an old, instinctual human fear of what cannot be seen, of the unknown.   


"We use the tunnels around camp all the time," Bellamy reminds her. He's holding her closer now, swaying them lightly back and forth. "And they're perfectly safe. No Reapers."   


"Yeah, but—Lincoln said they do use the tunnels." She stops the gentle shifting of their weight from foot to foot. Bellamy, behind her, turns tense and still.   


He leans back a little, trying to catch something of her expression from the side of her face. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see that he's frowning. "You don't really believe those stories, do you?"   


"I don't know."   


"Clarke, they're just legends."   


He drops his arms from around her, walks over to take a seat on a large, low, moss-covered rock. Clarke considers sitting down next to him, but finds herself pacing nervously instead, her hands curled into tense fists in her jacket pockets.   


"I know, but—what if they're not, though?" She stops, right in front of Bellamy, and meets his skeptical gaze head on. "It definitely sounded like Lincoln thought the stories were true."   


Bellamy raises an eyebrow. "We were sitting around a campfire after dark, and he told us a story about shambling, brainless mutants who wander the woods, looking for people to eat." He pauses, waiting expectantly. The expression on his face implies that his point, here, should be obvious. But she only bites her lip, and glances briefly over her shoulder at the entrance to the tunnel, still black and menacing, strewn over with crawling vines.   


"I'm just saying that I don't think it's that unrealistic," she says, after a moment, turning back to him with a shrug. The gesture, she hopes, makes her look like she's at ease, even though a creepy feeling is pricking its way up her spine.    


"Cannibal mutants are realistic?"   


"Bellamy, look around!" She gestures broadly, then immediately feels foolish. Yes, look around at this beautiful, undisturbed forest, wild and lush and peaceful. Except—isn't it a little too peaceful. A little too quiet—?   


He's raising his eyebrow at her again.   


"I mean we're standing on a planet that was so completely irradiated, our people had to live in space for ninety-seven years. We've both seen animals with mutations. And—and weird stuff that we didn't read about in Earth Skills—"   


"How would you know what was in the Earth Skills reading when Wells did all your homework for you—?"   


"Not the point." She feels an uncomfortable pink tinge along her cheeks, sweeps her hair out of her face with a short, prim gesture, and crosses her arms again. "My point is—the acid fog? The two-headed deer? The winter with barely any snow? Isn't it weirder to think that humans completely avoided experiencing mutation than that, I don't know, some of them did change?"   


"Into monsters?"   


"Well—yeah." She drops her hands to her sides, not sure what else she can say to prove her case.   


Bellamy looks sympathetic, at least, if not actually convinced. He reaches out, grabbing her hands and pulling her close again. Her legs bump up against his knees. His hands are so large that they all but swallow her hands.   


"Okay," he says. "It's possible. But isn't it more possible that it's just a story? People have been telling each other scary stories and urban legends since... forever, basically. Usually the same couple stories over and over, just mixing and matching different elements. Stories about ghosts, about creatures, about serial killers—about people who turn into creatures or about serial killer ghosts. And all those monsters want to do the same thing: murder the living."   


"Right, and some of those stories are true," Clarke answers. "Radiation really did cause mutations. And serial killers do exist. Maybe ghosts and monsters don't, but the danger is real."   


"And that's the point of the stories," Bellamy finishes, his voice rising with excitement now, his hands holding on tightly to hers. "To warn people, to teach them. That's why they get told over and over again. That's why not even the end of the world killed them off. The same elements show up again and again because people have certain elemental fears and because they need the same basic lessons."   


"Like not to wander around alone at night." She perches carefully on Bellamy's lap, one of her hands still wrapped up in his, while his other arm encircles her waist and holds her steady. "Or to be aware of your surroundings."   


"Or—" He leans in, kisses her briefly on the lips. "In this case, to be careful when you're out in the woods."    


Clarke smiles. With her back to the tunnel, and secure in Bellamy’s embrace, her brief sense of unease has started to fade away. She rests her hand gently against Bellamy's cheek. "Careful, huh?"   


"Mmmhmmm."   


He opens his mouth as if about to say more, but Clarke cuts him off with a kiss. She doesn't care a bit about the Reapers anymore, not when Bellamy is holding her, safe and close in his strong arms; not when his mouth is opening to the pressure of her mouth. She flicks her tongue against his tongue. He bites playfully at her lip.    


Flesh-eating mutants, she thinks—a silly story. Believable perhaps by the flicker of the campfire light, when the deep, unknowable darkness is only barely kept at bay. Believable in the undisturbed stillness of the forest, when trees and rocks lose shape and certainty in the eerie clouds of fog. But still only stories, at the end of the day.   


Bellamy lifts her up, sweeping her down and almost the ground, and she shrieks with giddiness and surprise, and then laughs. The sound reverberates, sharp and clear, through the trees. Her legs and arms wrap around him; her lips find his again as he lays her down in the dirt. She tangles her fingers in her hair, tugging him closer, tugging him down with her amid the moss and the rain-slick fallen leaves. She is so unbelievably happy, and so at ease.   


She does not hear, any more than Bellamy does, the slight and subtle clanking, like thudding footsteps, deep in the metal tunnel. Coming closer. Slow and steady footsteps thumping ever closer to the vine-strewn entranceway.

**Author's Note:**

> Moodboard here on my tumblr [@kinetic-elaboration](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/188641817150/theyre-coming-to-get-you-bellamyclarke-2k).


End file.
